OIL BOOMTOWNS

Beginning in the 1890s, oil fever spread expectations
of new growth and money across the
Great Plains from the eastern parts of Kansas
and Texas. Oil seeps and folds and faults in
the layered limestone beds of the Flint Hills
looked promising to both oil scouts and geology
professors at the University of Kansas.
Prairie Oil Company, correctly suspected to
be allied with the Standard Oil Company of
John D. Rockefeller, brought twenty experienced
drillers from older fields in Pennsylvania
to Neodosha, Kansas. In 1893 they completed
the first commercial well in the giant
midcontinent collection of fields that would
eventually arc southward through Oklahoma
to Abilene, Texas. A lively oil industry also
developed in the Prairie Provinces.

The Plains were open to high hopes, exploration
for oil, and speculative investments. Oil
was found in Central Texas, just to the east of
the Plains, at Corsicana in 1894. Discovery
wells were subsequently drilled in Indian Territory
and Texas. As new fields were found,
schemes to solicit investment money for oil
development became particularly active in
Fort Worth, Texas. Later, Calgary, Alberta, developed
a similar collection of brokers selling
leases and shares in new oil companies, some
of which were paper creations aimed at gullible
purchasers.

In the United States, the production of oil
from states west of the Mississippi River exceeded
that of the eastern states by 1904. At
that time, interest focused on the Osage Hills
in Indian Territory near the Kansas border. A
major discovery in the Turner Valley of Alberta,
just to the south of Calgary, in 1914
started a rush to develop the large new oil
reservoir. In both the Prairie Provinces and
Kansas, large amounts of natural gas were
also found. Towns and cities began to enjoy
heat and lighting from natural gas as
pipelines fanned out across the Plains. With
new discoveries, especially in North Texas and
the Permian Basin of West Texas, a chain of
booming oil towns appeared from the far
southern reaches of the Great Plains to its
northern margins.

Black-and-white photographs taken in the
oil boomtowns show landscape images of
raw wood, angular steel, and legions of grimy,
exhausted men staring blankly into the camera.
Heavily laden wagons threaded for miles
along rutted roadways hauling pipe and supplies.
Other pictures of intensely worked early
fields show scars, scrapes, roads, trenches,
and blast holes in the land similar to some of
the battlefields of World War I. The boomtowns
filled with men who worked, slept, ate
and imbibed, celebrated, waited for mail,
prayed with oil field preachers, and occasionally
fought each other. Women and children
found it difficult to fit into these places of
bad housing, incessant noise, invasive lights,
dangerous machinery, fires, toxic flammable
gases, explosions, unsanitary conditions, and
high prices, but surprising numbers of them
endured the hardships of oil field life as they
migrated with their husbands or fathers from
one new field to the next. However, the harshness
of such a life was reflected in high divorce
rates, especially in the early development periods
of isolated fields like the Permian Basin.

raw wood, angular steel, and legions of grimy,
exhausted men staring blankly into the camera.
Heavily laden wagons threaded for miles
along rutted roadways hauling pipe and supplies.
Other pictures of intensely worked early
fields show scars, scrapes, roads, trenches,
and blast holes in the land similar to some of
the battlefields of World War I. The boomtowns
filled with men who worked, slept, ate
and imbibed, celebrated, waited for mail,
prayed with oil field preachers, and occasionally
fought each other. Women and children
found it difficult to fit into these places of
bad housing, incessant noise, invasive lights,
dangerous machinery, fires, toxic flammable
gases, explosions, unsanitary conditions, and
high prices, but surprising numbers of them
endured the hardships of oil field life as they
migrated with their husbands or fathers from
one new field to the next. However, the harshness
of such a life was reflected in high divorce
rates, especially in the early development periods
of isolated fields like the Permian Basin.

In the 1920s the large oil companies began
building camps for workers and families in an
attempt to improve living conditions in the
new fields. Life in these camps was preferred
over the tents or boomtown housing, even
though most camps only provided a few rows
of houses painted white with green or orange
roofs. Outdoor toilets were the rule, but even
these were unavailable in many camps and
towns, leaving people to their own devices,
usually vacant lots or empty fields. Contagious
diseases, including tuberculosis and
diphtheria, spread rapidly in such conditions.

Many people came to the boomtowns to
make money in service occupations, most of
which were as legitimate as running retail
stores, hotels, and restaurants and teaching
school. Some came to practice lucrative illegal
activities such as bootlegging liquor, gambling,
and prostitution. "Jake joints" sold Jamaican
Ginger, an illegal alcoholic product
well known for paralyzing the legs of those
who drank too much of it.

The Turner Valley of Alberta had its own
collection of oil boomtowns such as Longview
(dubbed Little New York) and Royalties (Little
Chicago), with seedy suburbs such as Banana
Flats and Whiskey Row. The valley quickly
filled with development. One area of the valley, with its numerous gas flares, became
known as Hell's Half Acre. The same name
described a few blocks of saloons in Fort
Worth, Texas.

For the Great Plains, oil and gas development
meant frontiers in a new guise. Some
towns appeared and became small cities; others
quickly disappeared. The fields needed a
few larger places to serve as regional oil field
support centers for equipment and services.
Examples include Odessa, Texas, and Wichita,
Kansas. Others, like Fort Worth, Texas, Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma, and Calgary, Alberta,
became even larger oil and gas logistical centers,
with central supply houses, technical services,
and homes for families as workers were
able to drive farther to work in the fields on improved
highways. At the eastern margins of the
Great Plains, two major management and finance
centers–Dallas, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma–
became the hometowns of wealthy oil
investors who founded their own corporations–
Harry Sinclair, J. Paul Getty, and H. L.
Hunt, among others. The population shifts
prompted by oil development jolted Great
Plains farm and ranch people, as did the grimy
landscapes filled with manic activity and so
completely defined by their function that their
form and appearance became a kind of ingrained
tattoo.

Boomtowns such as Borger, Texas, and
Kiefer, Oklahoma, earned reputations for violence,
but most injuries and deaths were
caused by dangerous jobs around large, moving
equipment or explosions in the oil fields
rather than from fighting in the streets or saloons.
A distinction can be made between
some Texas and Oklahoma towns, with their
whiskey celebrations in saloons and dance
halls, and more staid Kansas towns, with their
clear ideas of propriety and personal conduct.
Everywhere, life in the fields discovered after
World War II was milder than in the early
boomtowns.

The early Plains boomtowns, mainly those
in Texas and Oklahoma, became a popular
setting for fictional stories. A singular theme,
the corrupting influence of oil money, was
emphasized repeatedly in novels and movies,
with iconography and imagery drawn from
the stereotypical early boomtowns. This simplified
representation became the standard
view of all oil towns across the Great Plains.
The 1941 Hollywood movie Boom Town, set in
Burkburnett, Texas, is typical. The central figure
drills his first well with stolen money, rejects
his oil field partner and his wife, and
enjoys the sweet life with lots of booze and a
new romantic liaison. After losing his fortune,
he sheds the evil of oil money with the help of
his old friend and long-suffering wife, then
returns to the true values once again to drill
another well.